Views in Haskell

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

There's been lots of interesting feedback about the views proposal -- thank you.

Many of the suggestions amount to plausible design alternatives.  If I do all the editing, I'll just become a bottleneck, and I'm more than usually snowed-under at the moment.  So I've moved the Wiki page to the GHC wiki, which is world-editable.  It's here
        http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ViewPatterns

The wiki isn't a good place for to-and-fro debate, but it is a good way to capture design alternatives.  If those with alternatives to propose would like to add them (in an even handed way needless to say) to the wiki page, that'd be good.  Feel free to re-structure the text if that'd make it clearer.

The big question is, as several people have observed, whether the (modest) gain is worth the (also modest) pain.  If the proposal has merit, it is its extreme simplicity.  There's no comparison with things like class aliases, which are a Much Bigger Deal on both those metrics.

Simon